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The Clinton Parameters (2000)

The Clinton Parameters are the bridging proposal President Bill Clinton read to Israeli and Palestinian negotiators at the White House on 23 December 2000, five months after the Camp David summit collapsed and three months into the Second Intifada: a Palestinian state on 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank plus a 1 to 3 percent land swap, all of the Gaza Strip cleared of settlements, a capital in East Jerusalem divided along ethnic lines, full Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount with Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall, and a refugee solution directed into the new state rather than into Israel. Israel’s cabinet accepted the Parameters within the deadline Clinton set. Yasser Arafat never gave a real answer, and Clinton, Israel’s negotiators, and several Arab leaders who urged him to sign all said afterward that the answer he finally gave was no.

What was actually on the table

Section titled “What was actually on the table”

Clinton dictated the Parameters aloud on 23 December 2000 and gave both delegations five days to accept or reject them as a basis for a final treaty; they were withdrawn when he left office. The terms, as recorded by the American team and by Israel’s negotiators:

  • Territory. A sovereign Palestinian state on 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank, with a land swap from Israel proper of 1 to 3 percent. Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s foreign minister and lead negotiator, writes that with the swap, a safe-passage corridor linking Gaza to the West Bank that Israel could not interfere with, and Palestinian use of assets inside Israel such as docks at Ashdod and Haifa, the package was “for practical purposes tantamount to 100 per cent” of the territory. The Jordan Valley, Israel’s traditional security buffer, would pass gradually to full Palestinian sovereignty.
  • Jerusalem. Two capitals in one city, Jerusalem and al-Quds, divided on the principle that Arab neighborhoods are Palestinian and Jewish neighborhoods are Israeli. On the holy sites, the formula went further than any Israeli government had ever gone: full Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount, Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall, with a symbolic Israeli link to the holy of holies beneath the Mount.
  • Refugees. A right of return “to historical Palestine”, meaning to the new Palestinian state and to the swapped areas without limit, but no right of return into Israel itself; admission to Israel would be humanitarian and at Israel’s sovereign discretion, backed by a multibillion-dollar international fund for compensation and resettlement. This is the clause that ended the five-million-refugees question in every serious negotiation since.
  • Security. A non-militarized Palestinian state, an international force in the Jordan Valley, and phased Israeli withdrawal over three years.

Israel said yes, over its own army’s objections

Section titled “Israel said yes, over its own army’s objections”

Barak’s government accepted the Parameters by Clinton’s deadline, on 27 December 2000, with reservations the Americans judged to be inside the framework. It was not a cost-free yes: the government was by then a minority government, the Intifada’s suicide bombings were running, and the acceptance came over what Ben-Ami describes as “sweeping opposition” from the security establishment, with Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz publicly calling the Parameters “an existential threat to Israel,” a public intervention Ben-Ami calls “almost tantamount to a coup d’etat.” The cabinet accepted anyway.

Arafat did not. He let the deadline pass, and, in Ben-Ami’s account, “lingered” and stalled, touring Arab capitals rather than answering. When his answer came in January it was hedged with reservations on every core issue, territory, Jerusalem, and refugees, that the American mediators judged to fall outside the Parameters entirely. Dennis Ross, who ran the file for Clinton, wrote that Arafat’s response was a rejection in substance; Clinton wrote the same in his memoir.

What the Arab world told Arafat

Section titled “What the Arab world told Arafat”

The claim that Arafat had no political room to sign is contradicted by the record of who urged him to. Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington, Bandar bin Sultan, spent the first days of January 2001 personally pressing Arafat to accept, and his warning to Arafat, recounted in Elsa Walsh’s New Yorker profile, was blunt: “If we lose this opportunity, it is not going to be a tragedy. This is going to be a crime.” Egypt’s ambassador Nabil Fahmi pressed the same case. And twenty months into the Intifada, Arafat’s own former information minister, Nabil Amr, published an open letter to him in the PA daily Al-Hayat al-Jadida on 2 September 2002: “Didn’t we jump for joy over the failure of Camp David?… Today, after two years of bloodshed, we are asking for exactly what we rejected then.” Amr’s house in Ramallah was shot at that month, and a 2004 attack cost him a leg. Fatah’s own published explanation later called the Parameters “the biggest trick,” designed to turn the conflict into an internal Palestinian one, an argument Ben-Ami reads as an admission that peace on these terms risked civil war with the rejectionists, and that Arafat chose accordingly.

The Taba postscript, January 2001

Section titled “The Taba postscript, January 2001”

Talks resumed at Taba in Egypt from 21 to 27 January 2001, in the last days of both Clinton’s term and Barak’s government. Israel arrived offering to dismantle, or hand over intact to returning refugees, more than a hundred settlements, keeping only the blocs adjacent to the 1967 line under Israeli sovereignty. The Palestinian maps at Taba rejected the settlement-bloc concept outright, treating every settlement as an isolated outpost, a reversal of what Palestinian negotiators had accepted in earlier back channels. On Jerusalem, Yossi Sarid, the most dovish member of Israel’s delegation, proposed splitting the four open questions two and two, resolving two per the Palestinian position and two per the Israeli one; the Palestinian side was unmoved. The joint closing statement said the two sides had never been closer, which was true and beside the point: there was no acceptance, Clinton was gone, and two weeks later Barak lost the election to Ariel Sharon by the largest margin in Israeli history. Ben-Ami’s verdict on Taba is that it failed because the Palestinians treated the Clinton Parameters as non-committal and reopened every point.

Why this document matters

Section titled “Why this document matters”

The Parameters are the answer to the “there was no real offer” argument about Camp David. Whatever can honestly be said against the July summit, that it was rushed, that its map was never one written document, can not be said about December: the Parameters were written, read aloud, presented identically to both sides by the president of the United States, accepted by Israel, and refused by Arafat while a terror campaign he had let loose was killing civilians. Ben-Ami’s summary of the whole arc is the one to keep: three times, in 1937, in 1947, and in 2000-2001, the Palestinians were offered statehood, and three times the leadership said no. The 2008 Olmert offer made it four.

Section titled “Related pages”

2000 Camp David Summit · Second Intifada · Yasser Arafat · The Oslo Accords, 1993 to 1995 · Who started the intifadas · The offers refused, the full record

Sources

Section titled “Sources”